About Leading Learning

Leading Learning provides a range of resources to help learning business professionals excel in the global market for lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development. Current Leading Learning resources include:

Learning Business Professionals?

Yes, learning business professionals. You can tune into an episode about learning business professionals here, but the general idea is that these are people who work in learning businesses – that is businesses that serve the global market for continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning. We see this as a huge, but generally overlooked and and under-appreciated area of education – basically, a third sector of education, and one that has become more and more important as technology has transformed the global economy. (Here’s our take on why the learning business is so important.)

Being a professional in a learning business is different from working in a corporate learning and development department or in academia. Learning business professionals have to understand how to create effective learning experiences, but they also have to understand business – how to attract, convert, and retain customers for their learning experiences in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Some of the traditional places where learning business professionals can be found include:

Trade and professional associations

Commercial training and consulting firms

Nonprofit training and consulting firms

College and university continuing education divisions

In recent years, with what technology has made possible, an increasing number of independent subject matter experts have become edupreneurs and also joined the ranks of learning business professionals.

If you identify with any of these categories or, categories aside, simply identify as someone who serves the market for continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning, then you are in the right place.

We’re Out to Elevate the Learning Business

Our goals for Leading Learning are:

To raise awareness of the third sector of education and the critical role that learning businesses play in it

To help learning businesses increases the reach, revenue, and impact of their offerings

To support individual learning professionals in achieving high levels of performance in their work

Uh, and Who Are You?

Good question. Leading Learning is an initiative of Tagoras, which means it is mainly an initiative of the two people you see over to the left, Tagoras co-founders Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele.

We’ve each been working in the business of lifelong learning for (hard to believe!) more than 20 years. We’ve worked for multiple learning technology companies and have built and sold a learning technology company of our own. For more than 10 years (through Tagoras) we have consulted with a wide range of organizations in the learning business to help them improve their performance. Last, but certainly not least, we are in the learning business ourselves. In addition to what we offer through Leading Learning, we are hosts of Learning • Technology • Design™ (LTD) and the Leading Learning Symposium. And that’s just for now.

We’re not going to try to tell you we are “passionate” about the learning business. We cringe at the over use of that word, and there’s a decent chance you do too. If you really want to gauge whether we’re worth listening to, we encourage you to use the handy trust-and-authority meter available in your browser bar: Google. A little searching on us and Tagoras and you will see pretty quickly that the learning business is what we’re all about.